Secular Trans Feminism

Zinnia Jones is a writer and videoblogger, co-blogging with Heather McNamara and Lux Pickel. She's written extensively on the subjects of secularism, feminism, and being transgender. Since 2008, her videos have received over 8 million views, and her articles have been featured in Autostraddle, the Huffington Post, and The Fight magazine. You can reach her at zjemptv@gmail.com, or on Twitter at @ZJemptv, and her YouTube channel is at www.zinniajones.com.

About Lux Pickel

Luxander Pickel is a genderqueer atheist and nerdy Whovian. They care very much about human rights, destroying harmful social systems, and promoting rational thinking. Lux struggles with depression and spends a lot of their time playing video games. When less debilitated by chronic illness, they love to write about social justice and make art; on a good day they love chatting about sex and relationships from a poly-demi-pansexual perspective.

EVENTS

Is This Really Just “Mainstream Christian Advocacy”?

Following the shooting of a security guard at the anti-gay Family Research Council, Washington Post columnist Dana Milbank called it “reckless” for the Human Rights Campaign and the Southern Poverty Law Center to say the FRC is a “hate group”. He further suggested that calling the FRC “hateful” is an example of “inflammatory labels” and “hurling accusations that can stir up the crazies”, and questioned why the SPLC considers the FRC a “hate group” alongside the KKK and Aryan Nations. Throughout the piece, Milbank describes the FRC as “a mainstream conservative think tank”, “a policy shop that advocates for a full range of conservative Christian positions”, “a mainstream Christian advocacy group ” , and “driven by deeply held religious beliefs”.

But Milbank’s appraisal of the FRC as something other than hateful is only possible because of his complete refusal to examine the actual substance of the organization’s infamous “conservative Christian positions”. For anyone with even a cursory knowledge of the group’s so-called “mainstream Christian advocacy”, the claim that they aren’t hateful is so plainly ridiculous that the very word “hate” is meaningless if it doesn’t include the FRC.

An accusation of hatefulness certainly isn’t something to be thrown around lightly – it has to be earned. And the FRC has been working overtime since its inception to do just that. They’ve made no effort to hide their extraordinary attacks on the LGBT community; for anyone who cares enough to look, all of this is a matter of public record.

Testifying before the Maryland State Senate, FRC senior policy fellow Peter Sprigg – whose medical qualifications include being a professional actor and an ordained Baptist minister – again claimed that trans people should only receive “mental health treatments to help them become comfortable with their biological sex”. He further added that they transition “to fulfill their sexual desires”, which he describes as “transvestic fetishism”. In a policy document on gender identity nondiscrimination ordinances, which Sprigg labels “bathroom bills”, he argues against trans people being allowed to present as their identified gender, calling them “often highly unconvincing and therefore disturbing to witnesses”. To Dana Milbank, this is just “mainstream Christian advocacy”, which apparently includes denying health care and legal protections to entire classes of people and calling them sexual fetishists who are ugly.

The FRC and its staff have also used distorted and debunked studies to claim that LGBT people are unfit parents and are more likely to molest children. FRC president Tony Perkins describes pedophilia as “a homosexual problem”, and senior fellow Timothy Dailey has claimed that “disproportionate numbers of gay men seek adolescent males or boys as sexual partners”. An FRC pamphlet from 1999 stated: “One of the primary goals of the homosexual rights movement is to abolish all age of consent laws and to eventually recognize pedophiles as the ‘prophets’ of a new sexual order.”

They’ve recently cited a widely criticized study, which included hardly any examples of long-term same-sex parenting and was found to be severely flawed in an audit by the journal that published it, to claim that children of gay parents were more likely to be sexually abused, and “fare worse on most outcomes”. The study’s author admitted that it was not representative of stable families with same-sex parents, and the journal Social Science Research believes the paper’s methodological flaws should have disqualified it from publication. The FRC called it a “gold standard” of research. Is misrepresenting the competence of same-sex parents and the welfare of their children just one of those “deeply held religious beliefs”?

Of course, the FRC isn’t content with merely opposing the recognition of our families and depicting us as sexual predators – they’ve repeatedly challenged the very legality of our consenting, adult relationships. In 2010, Peter Sprigg appeared on Hardball and stated, “I think that the Supreme Court decision in Lawrence v. Texas which overturned the sodomy laws in this country was wrongly decided. I think there would be a place for criminal sanctions against homosexual behavior.”

The FRC was also found to have spent $25,000 lobbying Congress against approving a resolution condemning Uganda’s Anti-Homosexuality Bill, which would institute the death penalty for anyone who had gay sex more than once. Their explanation was that while they don’t support the Uganda bill, they only wanted to remove “sweeping and inaccurate assertions that homosexual conduct is internationally recognized as a fundamental human right”. It’s not that they want us dead or anything – they just don’t think we have the right to do what heterosexuals do every day without facing “criminal sanctions”, like death.

I have to wonder: if the KKK restricted itself to calling people of color child abusers and immoral sexual deviants with pedophiles for prophets, and demanded that they be denied health care and subject to “criminal sanctions”, would Milbank similarly object to calling them a hate group? Or would it be obvious that these are unambiguously hateful beliefs?

In asking us not to call this hateful, we’re expected to accept people wanting us demonized, detained, deported and dead as a normal part of American political and religious life. We’re the ones being told we must tolerate this as a simple difference of opinion – after all, it’s just “mainstream Christian advocacy”. To call them hateful is “reckless” and “inflammatory” of us; to be that hateful is mainstream and conservative of them.

There’s a remarkable irony in Milbank’s attempt to gloss over the particulars of the FRC’s beliefs by simply saying they’re “Christian”. He accuses us of calling Christian and conservative beliefs hateful, and yet he’s the one claiming that this unbelievable hostility toward our lives is just another element of Christianity and conservatism. Which is really worse: calling out hate groups for truly hateful behavior, or saying that mainstream American religion involves hating every aspect of our existence?

Not all deeply held Christian beliefs are hateful, and not all conservatism is hateful. But hate is still hate regardless of its religious or political origins. If these are your deeply held religious beliefs, then your deeply held religious beliefs are hateful. If these are your conservative Christian positions, then your conservative Christian positions are hateful. And if the FRC can’t be called hateful, then what can?

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Comments

Sounds to me like the FRC’s positions are “mainstream Christian advocacy”. The only difference I can see is that the FRC’s “hate flag” is flying higher and more obtrusively than the ‘hate flags’ of your typical Xtian advocates.

I got me thinking on something else only partially related – We need to turn some of your stuff like this into a commercial we can throw onto the air. Hand it off to a few LGBT groups and raise some money to hold it….Maybe a kickstarter. Something widespread to counter the lies, to reach even the most secluded members of the hate-cult. The GOP is already falling apart and bleeding it’s more center-leaning members. Opening them up to these criticisms on even a state wide scale during an election might make all but the extreme parts of the GOP cut them loose like we’re seeing with the recent rape comments. Atm, they can get away with this because not enough lay people know they are being called on their BS or what they’re actually saying – expose that to enough people, and the GOP will ostracize them to save face.

Of course Milbank is apologizing for the FRC. He’s be apologizing for the KKK if this was the 1950s. It is only because of secular law enforcement that the FRC does not harm people, terroize them, etc. They hide behind a veneer of civilization, but still advocate for the same things.

“deeply held religious belief” seems to be the new get out of jail free card for hatred and bigotry. Want to strip women of all reproductive rights? If its a “deeply held religious belief” it’s OK to violate a law like the Affordable Health Care Act to do so. Anything that interferes with acting on your bigotry based on your “deeply held religious belief” is an assault on religious freedom. So go ahead and be a hateful, bigoted bully as long as you do so because of your “deeply held religious belief” it’s OK and anyone who criticizes you is the real hater.

I’ve been following you on youtube for at least four years now, and I’ve always found what you had to say to be precise, thoughtful and incredibly important. Thank you for never backing down, embracing nuance, and giving snark when necessary.

It also actively makes things easier for child molesters. Redirecting attention from more-likely molesters to less-likely ones means that children are made more vulnerable. The FRC seems to consider this acceptable “collateral damage” as long as they can continue to attack LGBT people.

The “hate group” that the Republicans’ vice presidential candidate would be addressing? The Family Research Council, a mainstream conservative think tank founded by James Dobson and run for many years by Gary Bauer.

FRC is a long-standing Washington insider with access to presidential ears. Of course a Village idiot like Milbank is going to defend them.

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[…] and not essential to one’s health. This attitude has cropped up elsewhere, such as in the FRC’s contention that trans people detained by ICE should be denied access to their prescribed hormone therapy. The […]